“Glitch”

It looks like the relationship between Brian Eno and Warp is flourishing, as we're about to get another full-length record from him on the label titled Drums Between the Bells. That release is another collaborative effort, this time with the poet Rick Holland, whom he initially worked with in 2003 on a series of as-yet unreleased recordings. It follows that career-spanning pattern Eno has set, where he consistently loops back around to work with past conspirators (Robert Fripp, David Byrne, U2, etc.). The news of abandoned sessions between the pair, coupled with the recent not-for-public-consumption studio recordings between Roxy Music and Eno, makes you wonder what unreleased treasures he has archived on a hard drive somewhere.

On "Glitch", he cracks open that hard drive to show us where some of his current musical fascinations lie. The track uses a similar trick to "2 Forms of Anger" from Small Craft on a Milk Sea by pairing prickly electronics with live drum patterns. Eno likes to pepper his work with random components, and here he dumps great globs of blotchy machine-malfunction into the mix, making it sound as though the noisier parts of the song aren't entirely under his control. Holland's poetry is interlaced into "Glitch" courtesy of the monotone voice of Grazyna Goworek, which is tweaked into Bruce Haack-style robo-speak ("There is a glitch in the system outside the brain flow" being a particular highlight). The combined effect makes the whole undertaking sound like a wild William Gibson fantasy come to life.